In his post today on the Jason Richwine race-and-IQ controversy, Andrew Sullivan begins by acknowledging that Richwine’s recent study of ethnicity and immigration for the Heritage Foundation is worthless as a work of scholarship or public policy. He goes on to acknowledge that Richwine himself has a habit of consorting with white supremacists — his phrase, not mine.
So far so good.
But Sullivan goes on to argue that despite all that — despite the fact that Richwine is a hack, that he’s chummy with racists, and that his contemporary advocacy work is pernicious nonsense — Richwine himself deserves to be taken seriously as a scholar. Why? Because “the premise behind almost all the attacks – that there is no empirical evidence of IQ differences between broad racial categories – is not true.”
That’s not the premise behind the attacks. Here’s the premise behind the attacks:
First, as Sullivan notes, there’s the weaknesss of the claim that America’s “broad racial categories” can be used “as shorthand for a bewilderingly complex DNA salad.” Racial categories are culturally, not biologically, grounded — the geographical and ancestral dividing lines between what we think of as “races” have nothing to do with science and everything to do with our own ugly history of racial discrimination. As a result, any genetic research that doesn’t problematize such categories is going to run into major theoretical difficulties quickly.
Second, the concept of IQ is itself of dubious merit. As Sullivan himself declares, IQ is “an artificial construct” that “shouldn’t be conflated with some Platonic idea of ‘intelligence,'” assumed to hold “any moral weight or relevance to “immigration policy” or indeed “any public policy.”
That’s all important stuff. Race is a social construct with only an attenuated relationship to genetics, and IQ is a social fiction with only an attenuated relationship to intelligence. That would be enough to doom the race-and-IQ project, to my mind. But it’s only the beginning.
The third premise of the attacks on Richwine and his ilk is the objection that such research is unlikely to reveal anything about innate cognitive differences between human “racial” groups not merely because the theoretical underpinnings of such claims are so shoddy, but also because generations of such research have failed to produce any reliable positive results. Folks have been searching for evidence of heritable intellectual differences between ethnic populations for a very long time, and they’ve pretty much come up empty.
The fourth problem with this research is implied in the second, but extends beyond it: Even if such differences could somehow be proven — and again, there are powerful theoretical and evidentiary reasons why that is highly unlikely — the results would have no practical value, and tremendous potential for horrific misuse.
Let’s say it were discovered that one American racial group was, once all the effects of nutrition, healthcare, education, income, parenting, and every other environmental factor were controlled for, on average innately slightly less intelligent than another. Would that finding justify discriminating against the less intelligent group in employment, education, or any other realm of endeavor? No. Would it lend itself to any corrective public policies? Again no. It would be of no social value whatsoever.
Such a finding would, though — and this is the fifth problem with the project — assuming that the less intelligent group were a socially disfavored one (an unwarranted and yet essentially universal assumption), reinforce society’s ugliest racist attitudes and provide support (not justification, but support) to bigots and jerks. Although such research would not imply anything about any individual’s intellectual capacity, it would instantly be trumpeted as “proof” of all manner of false and discredited — and incredibly pernicious — beliefs.
Sullivan understands all this. He acknowledges most of it. And yet he insists that the work should be continued and embraced, though he provides no affirmative justification for that position.
Instead he offers nonsense like this:
We remain the same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species. But poodles, in general, are smarter than beagles, and beagles have a much better sense of smell. We bred those traits into them, of course, fast-forwarding evolution. But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre. It would be deeply strange if Homo sapiens were the only species on earth that did not adapt to different climates, diseases, landscapes, and experiences over hundreds of millennia. We see such adaptation happening very quickly in the animal kingdom. Our skin color alone – clearly a genetic adaptation to climate – is, well, right in front of one’s nose.
This paragraph is a miasma of shoddy argumentation. To wit…
- Human races cannot be productively analogized to breeds of dogs, for reasons that should be patently obvious. And human races should not be analogized to breeds of dogs, because such false analogies lend themselves so readily to vapid racist ends. It’s a lousy analogy, and one with a repellent history.
- Setting aside the faults in the race/breed analogy, if there were differences in cognitive or sensory capacity between human populations on the scale of those which exist between poodles and beagles, we’d know. We’d know because scientists have been assiduously searching for such differences for literally hundreds of years, hoping fervently to find them. They haven’t. Whether such differences, on such a scale, exist is a closed question, a question to which the answer is a clear “no.”
- No scholar or pundit is arguing “that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago,” or that “there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination.” Nobody. And nobody is criticizing the many many mainstream scientists who are doing productive, uncontroversial work on questions such as these. Sullivan’s implications to the contrary are strawmen, pure and simple.
And this, at last, is the final argument against the kind of willfully obtuse and credulous engagement with tawdry racial theorists that Sullivan is calling for:
It makes people like Sullivan himself — smart people with interesting stuff to say on a variety of other topics — act really really stupid.
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May 14, 2013 at 9:16 pm
hurrhurr
“Racial categories are culturally, not biologically, grounded — the geographical and ancestral dividing lines between what we think of as “races” have nothing to do with science and everything to do with our own ugly history of racial discrimination.”
“Nothing” might be a bit of an overstatement. If you happen to let facts bother you.
“Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
May 15, 2013 at 8:48 am
Angus Johnston
Well, let’s be clear about what we’re claiming here — what I’m claiming, and what the NIH is.
First, I didn’t claim that there wasn’t any relationship at all between race and genetics. Clearly there is a relationship, though an attenuated one. But when I said that the dividing lines between races aren’t based in science, I meant exactly that — that the racial categories in use today predate any of the scientific claims that are made for their salience, and thus map only partially to subsequently invented or discovered “racial” genetic groupings.
A couple of examples will indicate what I’m getting at here:
First, the geographical borders of various racial groups’ ancestral homelands are by no means fixed or settled, as the debates over the racial identity of the accused Boston bombers recently showed. There are no bright lines on the globe or in our DNA that mark the borders between racial categories, and yet bright-line distinctions have always been essential to American racial ideology.
Those fictitious bright lines are even more central to racial ideology when we consider people of mixed ethnicity. To claim Barack Obama or Malcolm X as “black” is culturally commonsensical, but ancestrally reductive. Given our country’s history of the color line and the one-drop rule, a divergence between cultural and ancestry-based racial taxonomies is inevitable.
That should make my own position a bit clearer. Now onto the NIH…
The first thing that needs to be noted about that study is that it wasn’t based on a random or representative sample of people. The participants were drawn from relatively homogeneous communities, and individuals who self-identified in ways that diverged from the racial taxonomy of the study’s authors were excluded from the sample.
Secondly, it should be made clear that the “clustering” seen in the NIH data was clustering around an observed norm rather than a predictive one. The NIH didn’t go in with a genetic profile for each race, in other words, and measure how well individuals matched up. Instead they examined groups of people according to their self-reported racial identity and conducted a genetic analysis intended to determine how cohesive those groupings were.
Nobody is denying that people from the same ethnic background are likely to share more genetic commonality than people of different ethnicities. That’s neither a novel nor a controversial claim. The question at hand is whether such ethnic “clustering” can be productively understood and deployed as evidence of unambiguous and salient racial distinctions, and that’s a question on which the NIH report is silent.
Here’s an illustration of what I mean.
In the US, it’s common to think of sickle cell anemia, a genetic condition, as a “black disease,” and in fact statistics on prevalence bear that out — black Americans are far more likely than whites to carry the sickle cell gene. But that fact, it turns out, is a result of ethnicity and history, not race.
Sickle cell is common in some parts of Africa, and some parts of Europe, but not others. As it turns out, most American blacks have ancestral origins in areas of sickle-cell prevalence, and most American whites do not. But if the geographic distribution of Americans’ ancestors were different — if, for instance, the country had been settled by South African blacks and Sicilian whites — the incidence of sickle cell in the white population would be higher than the incidence in the black population.
Race is a form of shorthand, in other words. It’s an approximation. In some situations, for some purposes, it’s a useful approximation. If you’re trying to tell someone which of your several friends named Jim you’re referring to, specifying that you mean “the white Jim” may be helpful, and if you’re trying to get the most bang for your buck in a sickle-cell awareness media campaign, targeting black media may have merit.
But the fact remains that Nelson Mandela is at less risk of sickle cell than Al Pacino.
May 15, 2013 at 11:23 am
Wednesday MOOCs, Strikes, Scandals, Snubs, and Flubs | Gerry Canavan
[…] * Six Reasons Why Race-and-IQ Scholarship is an Intellectual and Moral Dead End, with bonus followup. […]
May 15, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Black Mythology | coffeeandfingernails
[…] of treating intelligence as a measurable “thing in the head” and of treating race as something more than a social construct. The quote from John Stuart Mill cited in Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man applies […]
May 17, 2013 at 11:09 am
Roundup on race and IQ | Medical Anthropology
[…] Six Reasons Why Race-and-IQ Scholarship is an Intellectual Dead End from studentactivism.net, largely a response to Sullivan [via @savageminds] “Let’s say it were discovered that one American racial group was, once all the effects of nutrition, healthcare, education, income, parenting, and every other environmental factor were controlled for, on average innately slightly less intelligent than another. Would that finding justify discriminating against the less intelligent group in employment, education, or any other realm of endeavor?” […]
May 17, 2013 at 8:44 pm
colin
so when they find that one does have a better iq u can say “iq is dumb” and that would be the end of it. then of course they would still be all racist and stuff but its not like u can stop them by arguing with them i just gotta focus on science and leave them behind
May 20, 2013 at 2:07 am
Miguel Zavala
END RACIST SCHOLARSHIP! DEMAND A PUBLIC APOLOGY TO THE LATINO COMMUNITY BY JASON RICHWINE AND HIS HARVARD DISSERTATION COMMITTEE!
Sign the Online Petition:
https://www.change.org/petitions/end-racist-scholarship-demand-a-public-apology-to-the-latino-community-by-jason-richwine-and-his-harvard-dissertation-committee
INTRODUCTION
Jason Richwine in his capacity as a Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, co-authored a controversial report arguing that immigration reform will cost about 6.3 trillion more in benefits than the country can collect from undocumented immigrants in taxes, attributing the gap to lack of human capital while cynically noting that the cost would be lower if the workers remain undocumented as this would keep them from accessing public benefits.
In his Heritage report, Richwine builds on the same arguments found in his 2009 doctoral dissertation, “IQ and Immigration”, from Harvard University. Based on outdated and repudiated research and methods, which we consider irresponsible and racist, the dissertation argues:
“Hispanic immigrants and their children have a low average IQ, which prevents the second generation from achieving equality with the native majority. Parental expectations for their children are not met, because they cannot be, given the level of intelligence present in the community.”
This kind of pseudo-science disguised as “scientific scholarship”, employs deficit reasoning that positions ethnic “minorities” and the working class as deficient rather than viewing people in dignified ways. We believe that Harvard University needs to apply stricter criteria in assessing not just the merits of scholarship but weigh its ideological content and effect.
DEMANDS:
WE DEMAND A PUBLIC APOLOGY TO THE LATINO COMMUNITY BY JASON RICHWINE AND HIS DISSERTATION COMMITTEE, DR. GEORGE J. BORJAS, DR. RICHARD J. ZECKHAUSER, AND DR. CHRISTOPHER JENCKS.
WE DEMAND HARVARD UNIVERSITY CHANGE ITS RESEARCH POLICIES.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Support this cause by signing on to this online petition and help us reach our goal of 5,000 signatures. We call on all progressive scholars, community members, educators and students, to denounce this kind of work and pressure universities so that they are responsible in their research.
You can contact directly members of Jason Richwine’s committee, who we believe are just as responsible for this kind of scholarship as Jason Richwine, and Harvard’s Institutional Review Board.
Dissertation committee:
George J. Borjas, gborjas@harvard.edu , 617-495-1393
Richard J. Zeckhauser, richard_zeckhauser@harvard.edu , 617-495-1174
Christopher JenCks, christopher_jencks@harvard.edu , 617-495-0546
Harvard University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB):
Fanny Ennever, Senior IRB Administrator, fennever@fas.harvard.edu , 617-495-1775
Organizational Endorsements of This Campaign:
Send organizational endorsements of this online petition campaign to RACE.organization@gmail.com
Access Jason Richwine’s dissertation:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/08/jason-richwine-dissertation_n_3240168.html
June 4, 2013 at 11:09 am
Around the Web Digest | Savage Minds Backup
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